NEW YORK -- The sidewalk on Nassau Street a few blocks from the New York Stock Exchange is often crowded at lunch time.

Stockbrokers take cigarette breaks. Investment bankers stroll to the South Street Seaport. Tourists camera-click their way around the NYSE.

Nassau Street bustled with shoulder-to-shoulder traffic at noon Tuesday. But not with the typical crowds. These people came to crane their necks at the World Trade Center site, to set their own eyes on the jagged exoskeleton of the imploded skyscraper that still juts six stories out of the ground.

Fallout from the trade center attack is all around them. In the rubble left by the pulverized towers. In the police cordon around the NYSE. In the trucks carrying mobile Verizon pay phones, the inch-deep grit on the awnings, and the sense of awe in the air.

Then there's the paper.

Paper can tell the story of the World Trade Center attack: About the attack on capitalism, the vaporization of a landmark, the human loss and the brewing global conflict. About the unique society that existed around one of the world's most important financial centers.

Telephone data specialist Philip Rotondi saw the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Standing outside his office at 100 Wall Street, he saw the fire and smoke of the explosion. But one image sticks in his head. The paper that flew into the air.

"It looked like a whole bunch of confetti blowing away," Rotondi recalls. "My mind was in disbelief, so that's what it saw."

The towers imploded, and sent paper through the narrow byways of Wall Street. Down the Canyon of Heroes where soldiers and explorers and sports heroes get ticker tape parades. Past the stock exchange, where paper tickets can signal the transfer of wealth.

Some scraps still lie near the columns of Federal Hall, a few feet from the place where George Washington was sworn in as president. A spreadsheet tallies unknown accounts. A report from Trans Western Holding Co. notes, "No growth in Pubs Case."

A printout explaining procedures at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office lies beside a brochure from insurance firm Godwins, Booke & Dickenson. Nearby rests the receipt of a trade from Carr Futures, a Chicago-based firm with dozens of workers missing.

Nearby hang papers that tell more personal stories: the missing persons fliers posted by friends and families the attack left behind. They're posted anywhere there is a flat surface. On phone booths and panel trucks, on plywood barriers and shop windows and marble walls.

The people are listed as missing. By now they're almost certainly dead.

We tend to think of the World Trade Center attack as a hit on an obvious symbol of American capitalism and the rich and powerful who run the system. Many fliers underscore this notion. There are missing bond traders from the Cantor Fitzgerald trading firm, insurance executives from Aon, transfer agents from Marsh & McLennan, and traders from Merrill Lynch.

Still, the missing persons papers tell us the not-so-mighty died, too. Ecuadorean immigrant Fabian Soto was washing windows on the 107th floor of Two World Trade Center, near where Luis Lopez cooked Sbarro pizzas.

Amy Toyen, 24, came from Boston to attend a trade show at the Windows on the World restaurant. Ralph Licciardi installed electric lines for Aon Corp.'s offices on the 92nd floor.

The fliers give us a brief glimpse of the lost lives and the human pain. The fact that Richard Morgan, 66, had a surgery scar on his back and a titanium left hip. That finance worker Harry Goody favored black jeans and Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts. That hundreds of children have lost a parent.

Who will pay the price for all these losses? Perhaps papers tell that story, too.

The New York Daily News took President Bush's expression of vengeance Monday and printed a front-page poster of Osama bin Laden. "Wanted," it says. "Dead or alive."

Papers tell us many things. They also tell us the effort to get bin Laden is just beginning. But they can't yet tell us if that mission will succeed.